The Soft Skills Episode 🍦

Welcome to Iteration, a weekly podcast about programming, development, and design.

• JP Intro — Hi, I'm JP and I am a full stack developer. Today, I am joined by John:
• John Intro — My name is John and I am a software developer for a home services startup.

What are soft skills? Why are they important? Are they important?

Wikipedia defines "soft skills" ...

Soft skills are a combination of people skills, social skills, communication skills, character or personality traits, attitudes, career attributes, social intelligence and emotional intelligence quotients, among others, that enable people to navigate their environment, work well with others, perform well, and achieve their goals with complementing hard skills.

tldr; people skills

Hard skills, also called technical skills, are any skills relating to a specific task or situation. It involves both understanding and proficiency in such specific activity that involves methods, processes, procedures, or techniques

Conversation is loosely based on this book, the author is famously kind of a dick. Doesn't mean there aren't some solid takeaways, using it as a framework for conversation.

• Link to summary of "Soft Skills"
• Another summary

Section 1: Career

Few tips to improve your career:

• From SS: Specialize, don't generalize.
• From SS: "Fake it till you make it"

John

• Always be working on yourself: "Luck is when preparation meets opportunity"
• Meet lots of people, be helpful and friendly
• Do a lot of interviews.
• Confidence and enthusiasm — "Being enthusiastic is worth 25 IQ points."

JP

• The importance of friendliness. How does this work for introverts?

Recommended Career Books

• Linchpin
• Startup of You
• JP: Crucial Conversations

Section 2: Marketing yourself

• From SS: See yourself more as offering a service and not as a employee.
  • Less about Salary and work hours, more about the uniqe "Features and beniftis" you bring to the table, you solve problems, you are an investment not an expense.

John

• Blog, be vocal — Share what you learn, don't be afraid to look dumb.
• Teach others when you can
• Take speaking and presentation gigs (Was a speaker at GA and got work out of it, you never know)
• Again — Specialize

JP

• I love this idea around you being a service. EAAS: Engineer as a service
• I have mixed feelings about marketing yourself. I go back and forth on whether or not I want a bigger online presence

Section 3: Learning

From SS: "Learn you want? Teach you must."

John:

• Be consistent. 1 hour a day for 12 days is way better than a single 12 hour day.
• Try to understand the concepts, not the syntax.
  • Concepts and fundamentals you can take anywhere. Good domain design, testing, clean code. All these concepts work in any language / framework.

JP:

• Deliberate practice. I just hammer concepts into my brain until it sticks.
• Honestly, just keep writing code but more importantly keep READING code
• Whiteboard, talk about problems from a domain perspective

Section 4: Productivity

From SS: Focus

• John: +1 (20% done isn't worth anything. 5 tasks 20% done, or 1, 100% done)

From SS: Pomodoro Technique

From SS: Kanban

John:

• Getting Things Done
• Break down the work.
• 80/20 — Pareto principle
• Eat that Frog

JP:

• I'm currently giving Pomodoro a shot. I'm trying to figure out how to effectively context shift
• How do you eat an elephant?

Sections 5 and 6 — Financial and Fitness

Section 7: Spirit

From SS: power of positive thinking

From John:

• Mental space, day off, unplug sometimes.
• Confidence + enthusiasm

JP:

• I could use some tips from this section...

BONUS From John: Communication

• This one probably goes at the top of my list.
• #1 — Learn to be a better writer.
  • Book: On Writing Well
  • Tool: Hemingway Editor
  • Headline writing — Most important things first
• Learn how to explain complicated topics. ELI5

Picks

• John: Naps
• JP: Loom screen recording

Episode source